MODELLING OF RAILWAY VEHICLE WITH AIR SPRING AND EVALUATION OF PERFORMANCE. PARAMETERS

Abstract

With advancement in technology and its new features bring higher speed, with reliable safety and better ride comfort in rail transportation industries. Traffic jam in capital cities all around the world, wasting of passengers' time at the airports, huge mass transportation and so on bring a good opportunity for rail industries to attract more and more passengers and cargos to their services. In addition to safety, the other important issue for passengers to decide about transportation type is ride comfort during their trip. And that is why accessing better ride comfort during the trip for passengers is essential. In the general competition between different means of transportation the main issue is a fast, safe and comfortable journey. Furthermore, these services have to be at reasonable cost. To serve good ride comfort to the passengers, the secondary suspension of most new rail—vehicles is equipped with air springs. Air springs are very important isolation components, which guarantee good ride comfort during the trip. Even though the first patent about air springs for railway application dates back to the 1840's, their practical use began in the second half of the twentieth century. For instance, pneumatic cushion has been used since the second version of the French TGV (\TGV Atlantique") and significantly improve their comfort. Besides, pneumatic suspensions were used before on metros for which the possibility of controlling the vehicle height and of adapting to variable payload is very beneficial. To achieve those interesting properties, the air suspension involves a complete pneumatic circuit composed of auxiliary tanks, pipes, restriction orifices and several valves. Those various components can be combined in many ways leading to several suspension morphologies. For the prediction of the vibrations in the car body, a valid model of the air spring is needed. A new model for simulation of the air springs behavior has recently been developed at the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. The model is three-dimensional and consists of two parts, describing vertical and horizontal behavior. The thirteen input parameters of the model have, until now, been determined experimentally. In the present study ICF and LHB bogie passenger railway vehicles are modeled as a single car according to Indian railway standards using GENSYS multi-body software. Three different suspension configurations are studied for each vehicle. Configuration I is coil spring suspension in both primary and secondary suspension as generally. used in railways..